Pennant Wars uses Postmark as part of their bootstrapped stack

Nolan Madge is the founder of Inspigo, a company that builds sports simulation games for the web. Back in 2012, Nolan quit his job and dove head-first into creating Inspigo’s first game: Pennant Wars, a baseball simulation game. Nolan was bootstrapping Pennant Wars and saw that Postmark offers an additional 50,000 credits for bootstrapped businesses who are charging for their product. He uses Postmark to send every email for his app.

“Growing up I loved baseball, especially anything related to stats and numbers. I played baseball in college, but also spent countless hours managing teams in simulated baseball games." While fantasy sports exploded in popularity, simulation games were left behind. Nolan wanted to find a web-based baseball simulation game that took advantage of modern technology. "Sport simulation games were mired in a single-player desktop software experience with no web or mobile integration at all.”

When he couldn’t find a modern baseball simulation game, he decided to build his own.

“I love having final input on every decision, but the challenge is properly prioritizing tasks — allocating my limited resources and time to the right things. I knew I needed a way to send triggered emails, and that wasn’t something I wanted to spend a lot of time developing. Postmark popped up in a thread I found on StackExchange, and I really liked the simplicity and power of their API. When I read about their support for bootstrapped businesses, I was 100% sold.”

Pennant Wars uses Postmark to send weekly updates with performance data, as well as conditional onboarding emails. “If a new user doesn’t log in to check the results of their first game Pennant Wars sends them an email with additional info and tips on how to adjust their strategy for their next game.”

Early on, Pennant Wars emails were getting filtered as spam for many users. “Postmark made it easy to set up DKIM and SPF and over time domain history took hold and fewer and fewer messages were being filtered as spam. The support team at Postmark was a big help during this phase, and have always responded quickly and pointed me in the right direction.”

Nolan is building on the experience he gained building Pennant Wars. “My next big project is going to be Pigskin Wars, a football sim. I’m hoping to have it ready in 2016 and will absolutely use Postmark to send transactional email.”

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